Spider: A Novel - Hardcover

McGrath, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671665103 ISBN 13: 9780671665104

Publisher: Poseidon Pr, 1990

Synopsis

Spider, a lonely figure in a London boardinghouse, writes about his childhood, including his father's sordid affair and its violent impact on his mother, as his present sense of reality erodes

About this title

Review:

I cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a . . . thick, slow discharge I recognized as blood.

A wry, mesmerizing tale of madness in a London suffused with the smells of jellied eels, leaking gas, outdoor lavatories and furry feet. Spider obsesses about wetness and fire and sexuality, about "this business of the thought patterns" and "the dead eyes" of his father and a woman named Hilda. Somewhere inside Spider's internal web of illusions lurks the truth about his mother's death.

From the Inside Flap:

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.

About this edition

• Publisher: Poseidon Pr
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0671665103
• ISBN 13: 9780671665104
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 221